Issue VI, Volume X : July 2019

Carl Phillips - Poetry

Carl Phillips is the author of eleven books of poems, most recently Speak Low (FSG, 2009) and Double Shadow, forthcoming from FSG in 2011. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

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Starfighter Lilies

Just to have said aloud the name remains a way of rescuing,of bringing back flowers that have long since died orbeen thrown out like–though not exactly like–

the man who gave them, himself neitherthrown out nor dead but lying somewhere verystill now, between...Fall; don't fall–risk,

or safety; must coming close always mean to fail?Starfighter lilies: lofty name; silly, therefore. As ifbelief meant everything–the way, sometimes, it can

still seem to. As if they could rival the stars,for light. It has taken the dark, and you, for me to realize I'monly interested in knowing form through touch, not sight.

As for That Piece of Sundown You've Been Wanting

Like little forges for which the heart too oftengets mistaken, the dogs run ahead of me, justout of earshot, across what's a field, and thena coast: some stones, some sand. Funny howsorrow more often arrives before honesty, thanthe other way round. To my left, a blackness

like the past, but without the past's precision;to my right, the ocean... Not so lost as I'dbeen thinking, then–or had once, admittedly,maybe even hoped for. Kingdom of what's left,still, to be angry at, or forgive. All of the beesflying at last out of me. We're traveling north.